Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Edith came in bearing a plate of raspberry tarts . . . goodness, so we each took one while the professor rambled through the faded ink of yesterday, and we waited politely for him to recollect our presence. The old are like that. I saw that Edith knew that too. She smiled at us and bided her time until he should notice that she had a sweet to offer him.

  “That rascal! Biggest thief in office until the present lot.” He rattled the pages to find new sources of indignation or nostalgia.

  And then he stood. “I have indeed heard the name Eliza Gilbert, by God,” he thundered. “But only once, so long ago that I’d forgotten it.

  “I and the world knew her by another name for years, you see. A few of our performing lot went to the interment, quite a crowd for one so fast fallen from fame. Later, when the headstone had been placed, I returned to visit her grave. I had to check the site with the office, which finally directed me to ‘Eliza Gilbert,’ and I soon forgot that forgettable name. Why she was buried under that mystifying name I don’t know, but it ensured the obscurity of her grave.”

  Irene had stood up, the tart dropping to the floor.

  Her face was drained of everything but astonishment, as empty of expression as a milliner’s mannequin. She was suspended on the professor’s next words.

  He looked over the edge of the yellowed pages just then, equally astonished. “Irene, the paper is full of this woman. Here, on the front page.”

  “The front page!” I looked at it. “There was nothing but type about politicians and a series of their sketches.”

  “A sketch, yes, though nothing like the others I have seen, but a full story as well.” He turned the front page to face us. The few illustrations were as small as a large man’s thumbprint, and all of men, except for one woman.

  16

  IMPOSTER MOTHER

  The woman is so hard

  Upon the woman.

  —TENNYSON, “THE PRINCESS”

  Irene shook the paper she had snatched from his hand in the professor’s face.

  “The headline mentions no name, only ‘Foreign Dancer Dies in New York City.’ This is not Eliza Gilbert.”

  “This is, however,” he said mildly, “a lady I can tell you much about, for a finer likeness of her than this postage-stamp sketch hangs on that wall and she did die on the date you mention. Also,” he added, “a cartoon of her from the papers at midcentury inhabits one of the myriad pockets in my Coat of Many Memories.”

  Irene glanced at the wall he indicated, which was papered with theatrical posters and photographs. She then stalked over, the folded paper in her hand.

  I leaped up to follow, for I had not yet studied the newspaper page and was mad to see what woman we had overlooked.

  Practically bouncing up and down behind Irene’s shoulder to see the paper folded in her hand, I watched her examine every female image on the wall.

  There were a good many, and a good many of them wore the scandalous pale tights, colored pink in actuality, of a variety performer. The costume was reminiscent of medieval gentlemen in tights and puffed pantaloons and quite shocking to see on a modern, corseted woman instead of a skirt.

  At last Irene stopped searching the wall high and low and left to right. She paused before one likeness. Which was a very good thing, because I had grown quite dizzy without having yet had a clear look at the sketch in the newspaper.

  “This must be the woman.” Irene nodded at a photograph set dead center of the entire display, a dignified portrait, I was relieved to see, with indeed only the woman’s hands and face exposed. No tights. No long lower limbs utterly revealed.

  The photographed woman sat by the base of a large classical pillar, clothed in a great dark swath of velvet sleeves and cloak, almost like a tent. Little could be seen of her hair, for a soft velvet hat edged with a large feather concealed it. Only the narrow white border of a collar and cuffs contrasted with the dark dignity of her figure. Her face was as blandly pretty as her drooping white fingers, and in her right hand she held a most out-of-place object, a slender riding crop.

  This photograph had so snared Irene’s interest that I recalled her American singing master. He had mesmerized her to erase a particularly gruesome shock that had, for a time, stolen her singing voice. The trances had also erased many good memories of her girlhood.

  Yet now a quite different force held Irene entranced. This was fascination, perhaps with an alternate image of herself. This woman was dressed as Irene might have been for an operatic role. Knowing the way Irene’s fevered theatrical mind would erect serial novels from the slightest hint of a story, I suppose she envisioned her possible mother as a great stage performer, a Shakespearian actress perhaps.

  Certainly a woman as circumspect as I, a modest parson’s daughter, would happily claim the serene woman in the portrait as a mother, even if she had been so unsuitably employed upon the stage.

  The professor had come up behind us. “That is my favorite likeness, even though it’s perhaps the most unlike her, oddly enough. She had a face that could launch a thousand ships, but in other ways she had a thousand faces. The most fascinating woman of my era.”

  “Your era—?” Irene had turned to interrogate him. Despite the gentle, familial nature of her quest, she was as focused as a hunting dog on a scent.

  He shrugged, disarranging his loosely tailored coat. “I mean a time when I was young, or still could be considered young, the forties and fifties.”

  “She died young?” Irene glanced back at the classical figure in the photograph.

  “According to her.” His smile was cryptic as well as fond.

  “According to you and the Herald, in January of 1861. I would have been two or three then.”

  “If you had truly been born in 1858, as you were told,” I pointed out.

  Irene frowned over her shoulder at me. She wanted to hear of no more uncertainties in this tenuous quest.

  “And there,” said the professor, lifting an age-spotted hand to another framed picture on the wall, “is a newspaper sketch done when she first crossed the Atlantic to our shores.”

  Irene and I gasped in tandem, like overworked horses in the same traces. We stared at a drawing of a leaping woman in a ballerina skirt that barely covered her knees. She was poised in a small boat with a swan figurehead and Cupid, the bow pointing his arrow at a shore crowded with the crowned heads of Europe. The caption was “Europe, farewell! America, I come!”

  Irene immediately dropped her eyes to the tiny faded print on the yellowed page of the Herald.

  She read aloud the first sentence: “‘Some of the City’s first citizens commented today on the passing of a woman whose name was known to so many’—all right, then, so what is it?—‘but who was personally known to so few.’”

  Irene declaimed salient phrases: “‘many warm friends . . . generous to a fault . . . excitable to pity and kindly sympathies.’”

  I nodded approval.

  “‘Many acts of generosity, especially to poor people . . .’”

  Even as Irene’s voice grew more and more disbelieving, I rejoiced the more.

  “‘Generous . . . forgiving and affectionate . . .’ What was she, a performer or a saint? And what the devil was her name? Ah, here. At last. A whole string of them . . . ‘Maria Dolores Eliza Rosana Gilbertl’”

  “She was Spanish?” My enthusiasm rapidly waned.

  “Yes. Then she must have married a Gilbert.”

  The professor chuckled behind us.

  “Ah, some mention of her position in life.” Irene read approvingly, “‘Her natural talents were of the highest order . . . her accomplishments manifold—’” here she fixed me with an I-told-you-so look—“‘and in some respects, marvelous.’”

  The professor’s chuckles had become an elderly giggle.

  Irene frowned and stopped reading aloud, although her pace of silent reading quickened.

  A new and confusing burst of quotes issued forth next: “From Ireland . . . ‘neither credita
ble to her native land nor useful to society . . .’ England: ‘We do not think it desirable to narrate the adventures of unfortunates of her class, however prominent.’”

  “‘Unfortunates,’” I burst out. “Irene, in London that means—”

  “I well know what that means.” Irene regarded Professor Marvel with eyes of cut steel. “Who is this Maria Dolores Eliza Rosana Gilbert whom I have never heard of, but apparently the whole world knows, or knew, and you personally as well.”

  He shrugged again. “She was best known by a diminutive which became her stage name. I think you have heard it. Lola. Lola Montez.”

  Irene stepped back from the wall. Her arm fell to her side like a duelist who has fired her one and only shot and now must await the fate of another’s action. I was able to slip the newspaper from her nerveless fingers and finally read it for myself.

  “Lola Montez,” Irene repeated in tones of deep contempt.

  She might have just been told she was suspected of having a black widow spider for a mother. Indeed, the mysterious woman of her earliest childhood had reportedly worn black.

  “That name is vaguely familiar,” said I, hardly realizing I spoke aloud.

  Both ignored me. Irene had turned to face the professor as if they were opponents in a court of law.

  “You realize,” she said, “that I am seeking the identity of the mother who bore me. You realize that person cannot possibly be Lola Montez.”

  “Certainly not, Irene,” I put in. “If she was indeed an ‘unfortunate,’ no one of that immoral class could possibly be your mother.”

  “Of course she could, Nell!” Irene turned on me, with something resembling fury. “All the more reason for bearing an inconvenient child and abandoning it. But I would claim any unfortunate save her. Do you know who, and what, she was?”

  “Immorair?”

  “Worse!”

  “Worse?”

  “Say if I exaggerate, Professor! She was considered . . . haughty, vain, selfish, and worst of all, an abominably untalented dancer and an even more execrable actress. She was booed and hissed off the major stages of Europe for her sheer ineptitude. She can’t possibly have been my mother; I would have been born without a scintilla of talent. I would have booed her myself from the womb. How, Professor, can you have admired such a woman, even in your benighted youth?”

  His expression retained the warmth of benign memory. “She was a great beauty, Irene. You should have seen her. No painting or photograph captures her. She exploded with vitality. Black, shining hair, eyes of brilliant dark blue, flashing bolts from the gods on Mount Olympus. The daintiest little foot to touch hardwood stage floor and enough fiery spirit to instill the wildest stallion. It didn’t matter how well she did anything, Irene. Everything she did was with her whole heart and spirit and that was always . . . electric.”

  “‘Mrs. Eliza Gilbert’ was on her headstone,” I said softly.

  “And a bigamist, if I recall!” Irene charged suddenly. “The more I remember, the more I am appalled.”

  “She had an irregular childhood,” the professor said.

  Irene would hear nothing of the old man’s defense. “So did I. But I can sing on key. And act outside of an opera. And dance better in my sleep, no doubt.”

  “Can you dance?” I asked, thinking that might settle the matter.

  “Yes. And fence. And I have never been booed off a stage.”

  “A pity,” said the professor. “One can never learn true humility until one has faced that cruel situation.” He clearly had.

  “I do not need to learn true humility,” Irene retorted.

  “Spoken like the late Lola Montez.” The professor smiled.

  Meanwhile, I had been rapidly looking farther than the article’s first page, which quoted both damning and admiring summations of Lola Montez’s life.

  “She was involved with King Ludwig of Bavaria?” I asked the professor in some amazement.

  “Her most famous, or infamous association. She, and he, claimed their friendship was purely platonic. He had a queen, after all, but he made her Countess of Landsfeld and a citizen of Bavaria, under her duress, it was said. She was forced to flee the country during the late ’40s revolution that cost Ludwig his throne. Many blamed his association with Lola for that.”

  I glanced at my friend. “How interesting. Irene was . . . acquainted with the King of Bohemia.”

  The professor beamed. “Like mother, like daughter.”

  “You sly rascal,” Irene challenged him. “You are enjoying comparing me to this wretched woman. I do not have blue eyes, electric or otherwise, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I believe a father is involved in this process,” he said.

  “And,” I said slowly, “she did perform upon the stage.”

  “Nell,” Irene warned me, beginning to pace. She also began to dig in her reticule for her cigarette case and lucifers while continuing her interrogation.

  “It says in this newspaper, Professor,” I went on, “that she first had a stroke, then died of pneumonia contracted during a walk in wet weather. And she was not yet forty!’

  “Some say, scurrilously, that she died of diseases associated with her immoral life, but in fact she had always had weak lungs.”

  “Weak lungs? Well, she certainly could not have sung.”

  “But she smoked.”

  Irene stopped pacing, a telltale cigarette sending a flurry of smoke signals thick enough for a Red Indian to read into the air above her hat. “Smoked?”

  “Incessantly,” the professor said as Irene hurriedly stabbed her cigarette to death on her teacup saucer. “She was high-tempered,” he went on, nodding to the photograph again. “That riding crop was a frequent accessory, and she used it, whether on an impudent man who accosted her in public or a mob screaming for her blood in Bavaria. She was as fearless as a cavalry officer.”

  “Irene,” I told him informatively, “once took a riding crop to a set of gossiping women at the salon of Maison Worth in Paris.”

  “Really?”

  The professor joined me in studying Irene as she continued to pace before us.

  “Lola would wear men’s clothes on occasion,” he said. “To escape Bavaria, for instance, or during the harsh overland Panama crossing to the California gold fields.”

  “Irene has done that very thing,” I told him, with the sense of discovering I was chatting with someone with whom I had much in common, “and more than rarely. She fought a duel with swords in male disguise once, and Sherlock Holmes himself could testify personally how effective she was in such guise, much to his chagrin and professional embarrassment—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” she told us. “A man like Sherlock Holmes does not embarrass, and neither do I. You are both enjoying tweaking my self-respect, but these are the merest coincidences. Any independent woman in this age of milksop females might be expected to be as inventive and forceful in her habits and actions. I shall have to see a great deal more evidence before I believe that there is any possibility that woman could be my mother.”

  “You are in luck,” the professor said. “I believe that more has been written about her than any woman who lived in the middle of this century with the possible exception of your queen, Miss Huxleigh. In fact, she has written one of these books herself. She retired from the dancing stage here in New York after her return from California. Following a few final trips to Europe, she became a noted lecturer. I never saw her stage work, but in the lecture hall she was spellbinding. Alas, her decline in health soon followed. I believe she became quite religious in her last year.”

  “Professor,” I asked, “do you preface your last sentence with ‘Alas’ because her health declined or because she became religious?”

  His watery eyes regarded me for a long moment. “I must have meant only the former, Miss Huxleigh, for I believe it only right that a person leaves this earth in good order with her God.”

  At that Irene threw her hands into the
air and returned to her chair before the tea table.

  “This is arrant nonsense,” she said in calmer tones. “This is some foolish lark dreamed up by you and Sherlock Holmes to distract me from a search for my genuine mother.”

  “I do not know this Mr. Holmes,” he objected.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t contact you since he arrived in America. He is a possessive man, and our paths have crossed during his investigation of his various cases, as well during mine.”

  “Ah, yes. Your youthful work as a Pinkerton agent here in New York. You have continued with this in Europe?”

  “I do private inquiry work at times, yes. So simply because Sherlock Holmes leads me to a headstone in Green-Wood Cemetery does not mean the inhabitant of that grave leads back to me.”

  She picked up her cigarette case again, lighting one with deliberate, lingering grace, as if to blow smoke in the face of this theory. Then she spoke again, to the wall of memorabilia.

  “I do fancy the idea of carrying a riding crop, though. It does make so much more sense for the modern woman than a parasol.”

  She regarded the professor. “Since this woman had snared your youthful imagination, I will investigate her further, if only to utterly disabuse you of this fancy. Can you suggest where we should begin?”

  “Irene, I—”

  The professor spread wide his hands. “All of New York City is filled with the ephemera of Lola Montez. You should begin as one of those fevered collectors do, and find the books and posters of thirty and more years ago.”

  Irene frowned. “New York City has no Left Bank like that in Paris, full of book vendors’ stalls and old and quaint memoirs of the past.”

  “No,” the professor conceded, “but here we have do have the Rialto area of bookshops and especially Brentano’s Literary Emporium, and that should be a fine place to start.”

  MEMOIRS OF A DANGEROUS WOMAN:

  Panama Passage

  Came Lola Montez one day, in the full zenith of her evil fame,